In Bloom: Spotify rival promises streaming Nirvana

"We were talking names around the table and we misheard someone
who said 'balloon'," says Tum Nguyen, the co-founder and leading
software engineer of music industry hot topic Bloom fm. "Of course he was
joking," adds Nguyen quickly, "but as soon we all heard 'bloom' we
said that's fantastic because even before we came up with a name my
design brief to the team was: I want it to feel like I'm running
around a field of flowers and picking up music".

It is an amusing anecdote, but the haphazard way the music
streaming service fell upon its name is the exception to the rule
of an otherwise meticulously planned second coming. The reason is
Nguyen and fellow Bloom fm co-founder Oleg Fomenko have been here
before. The duo were behind mflow, a short-lived music
download service which rewarded users with discounts for
recommending artists, albums and tracks. It was first desktop- then
browser-based, but closed in January 2012 with a mysterious message
on the homepage: "Over the past few months we've been working on a
top-secret new project… we can't share this grown-up mflow with you
until we're confident it's better than anything you've used
before." Early signs suggest it might be.

What Nguyen and Fomenko learnt was to change everything. The
standard business model of desktop first, a premium for access on
mobile, restricted streaming and a focus on self discovery was
inverted. Bloom fm launched last month solely on iOS, it offers
unrestricted streaming and focuses on automated discovery. If you
login to Bloom fm with Facebook it aggregates what you list as your
favourite bands and starts playing with a single tap on the
homepage.

"It had to be mobile first," Nguyen tells Wired.co.uk. "Soon
everyone is going to be doing most of their computing through their
phones. It became a principle of how we approached everything [and]
because we focused on mobile first we were able to simplify the
design a lot. We didn't allow ourselves to get carried away adding
a million context menus and a million options, but we managed to
design an app that is fully functional without being in your face
and not knowing which button to press."

We are back to the name again. The happy accident of hearing
"bloom" instead of "balloon" inspired a unique structure for
navigation of the service akin to a sunflower with the genre or
artist in the centre and the surrounding petals offering sub-genres
or similar artists. Tap a petal and it is brought to the centre
with a new array of surrounding petals, tap the centre and you
begin playback. It is simple, organic and importantly it is fun to
use. In fact it feels almost childishly innocent as you both
discover artists and create bespoke radio stations in the same
playful way. Yet this hides a hard and potentially revolutionary
heart.

"We found only 12 percent [of people] have tried streaming on
their mobile in the UK," Fomenko tells Wired.co.uk. "We thought it
was mainstream, but when the penetration of smartphones is
approaching 80 percent you realise there is an unbelievable number
of people out there who have not been reached for a variety of
reasons. We believe those reasons are beauty, ease, not confronting
people with a search bar when they enter the app and," he pauses
"…price."

While beauty and ease will undoubtedly attract admirers, the
harsh reality in a world long used to free illegal downloads and in
the midst of an unrelenting global economic downturn is new players
require compelling prices. £5 per month for desktop and £10 per
month for desktop and mobile access has become a predictable norm,
but Bloom fm breaks from this with a system it dubs "borrow, enjoy,
return". Unlimited, genre and artist based radio stations are free,
but to "borrow" music (aka download it for offline access) prices
start at £1 per month for 20 tracks that can be swapped at any
time. £5 per month increases this limit to 200 tracks, £10 gives
unlimited borrows plus full on-demand streaming of artists and
albums.

Comments

I have given Bloom a go tonight - I am a long term user of Spotify and I have to say, Bloom, on first go is fantastic. It's easy to use, the user experience is significantly better than the Spotify UI and the genre selections have been hugely refreshing. My impression of Spotify Radio is that it has a long, long way to go to match this. I'm going to road test this with my free month of Full Bloom subscription. Spotify beware, you may have lost me.

Mike Hall

Feb 4th 2013

I've been using a demo of the Android version and I have to say its brilliant. It's pandora meets spotify. Simple and very easy to use. The only gripes would be certain artists missing (which they are working on) and some song volume is a bit low. That being said for only £1 a month you getunlimited radio sandcastle basically carry around 2 different albums every day if you want. Really good.